Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self & Marvell and Liberty. (Reviews).

Robert Ellrodt, Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. x + 369 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-19-811738-8.

Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds., Marvell and Liberty.

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xiii + 12 b/w pls. + 365 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-22171-1.

These two recent publications, the first by Robert Ellrodt which focuses on seven sixteenth and seventeenth-century "metaphysical" poets from the perspective of what Ellrodt terms "the unchanging self," and the second, ably edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, which presents fourteen original essays on Andrew Marvell and the concept of liberty, consider their materials from very different critical perspectives, with quite different results. Ellrodt's book is in many ways a return to and an extension of his well-known three volume 1960 study of Les Poetes Metaphysiques Anglais and a rejection of much postmodern criticism that has appeared in the intervening years. Chernaik and Dzelzainis's collection of essays on Marvell, on the other hand, rightly "could be said," according to its editors, "to represent the current state of scholarship on Andrew Marvell and on the relationship between literature and its historical context in the seventeenth century" (1).

In many ways, Ellrodt's study rejects much that has occurred in scholarship in the last forty years. Specifically, he challenges the postmodern assumption that no definite or constant self can be traced in the works of a writer. In Ellrodt's own words, "The wheel of theory keeps turning, yet the new historicist method is still characterized by a tendency to look upon the self as a fiction or mere role-playing" (v). It is this perspective that Ellrodt seeks to refute. As his title suggests, Ellrodt focuses his study on the seven writers traditionally referred to as the "metaphysicals": John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Edward Herbert, and Thomas Trahere. Unfortunately, Ellrodt presumes that all readers will understand why he has made this selection of poets and what the term "metaphysical" means. Thus, he fails to define what he understands by the designation, essentially referring readers back to his earlier work. While many specialist readers will be able to provide the necessary context, non-specialist and student readers may well wonder what this term means, why this constellation of writers, and why the absence of any women writers from the period. Moreover, Ellrodt has allowed traditional categorizing to govern the substance of his book and fails to articulate clearly how a definitively "metaphysical" understanding of the self--rather than a series of individual selves -- emerges.

Ellrodt divides his study into four parts, each with a different focus: modes of self-awareness; time, space, and world; modes of religious sensibility and modes of thought; and historical landmarks. Within each of these sections, Ellrodt reviews each of his selected seven poets, primarily, though nor exclusively, in chronological order. Ellrodt is certainly learned, and his learning is on display through his study. He attempts to build his subsequent chapters on the arguments he has made regarding each poet's self-awareness, finding in the seventeenth century some fundamental changes in self-identity that paved the way for the subjectivity of modern times. He holds his highest praise for Donne, as the poet who is the most innovative in poetic style and subject matter, a consequence he attributes not simply to Donne's historical moment but rather to what Ellrodt considers Donne's innate genius and personality. While all of this is interesting, and often insightful, it is worth noting that Ellrodt focuses prim arily on Donne's imaginative writing and much less on Donne's other works. I, for one, am resistant to the fundamentally biographical readings of poems in, for example, Donne's Songs and Sonets, that Ellrodt presents. Essentially, Ellrodt mines Donne's and other poets' verses for evidence of their own distinct personal characteristics. But, must every speaker in these poems represent Donne's mind or Herbert's mind or Marvell's mind? Somehow, Donne's wonderful sense of irony gets lost when we read him only in these terms. Still, while this is a difficult book to follow in a number of ways, at the same time it is not without its rewards, which emerge from its history of ideas approach to its subject and various insights into the personalities, if you will, of each of the writers presented.

Chernaik and Dzelzainis's collection of essays on Marvell and the concept of liberty looks not at the internal Marvell, in the way Ellrodt does. Rather, the contributors to their volume are interested primarily in placing Marvell in his historical context as a way of understanding more fully the issues -- and primarily the issue of liberty, broadly defined -- that consumed him, particularly in the years during and after the English civil war. As these essays remind us, Marvell was a writer deeply implicated in the history of his time. The collection is made particularly strong by its focus on the entire corpus of Marvell's writings rather than on the small collection of his poetry generally discussed. Scholars in addition to the editors contributing to this collection are: Annabel Patterson, Nicholas von Maltzahn, Paul Hamilton, Lyndy Abraham and Michael Wilding, Donald Friedman, John Creaser, James Loxley, James Grantham Turner, N.H. Keeble, Jon Parkin, M.L. Donnelly, and Susan Owen.

According to the editors, Marvell and Liberty had its origins in a 1996 international conference held under the auspices of the Centre for English Studies at the University of London. Essentially, the participants and later contributors to this volume were interested in moving past the understanding of Marvell prevalent at the time of his 1978 tercentenary celebration - that is, the Marvell defined by T.S. Eliot, a Marvell known primarily for his several memorable poems such as "To His Coy Mistress," "The Nymph Complaining," "Upon Appleton House," "An Horatian Ode," and "The Garden." As the editors rightly remark, "The need for a comprehensive reassessment of Marvell's life and writings, in prose as well as verse, is all the greater in that the last two decades have seen a profound revision of the understanding of this history and politics of the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration" (3).

The contributors to Chernaik and Dzelzainis's collection have succeeded in providing such a reassessment. They have been particularly successful in focusing on the post-Civil War Marvell and in integrating Marvell's later writings, in both verse and prose, into our understanding of his literary achievement. For example, a number of essays in the collection focus on Marvell's later works such as The Rehearsal Transpros'd and his anonymously issued Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. Patterson, for example, sees Marvell's Account as the beginning of a new genre known as "secret histories," anonymous criticism of current political situations. In the collection's attention to works of the 1650s, it is not surprising that several essays focus on the "Horatian Ode," while a number of others look at "Upon Appleton House" and "The First Anniversary." In each of these cases, the writers provide new insights based on rich historical contexts for the poems.

This collection on Marvell and the concept of liberty is especially valuable in its focus on less frequently discussed late Marvellian works such as The Rehearsal Transpros'd, his Account of the Growth of Popery, and his late, ambitious verse satire, Last Instructions to a Painter. Undergirding all of these essays is a presentation and understanding of Marvell, throughout his life and not only during the Civil War years, as a "defender of liberty against the assault of would-be-tyrants" (15). The Marvell that emerges from these essays is one committed to politics and freedom throughout his life, and not only in his youthful years, and one whose political commitment causes him to turn to art frequently and often. Or, to put it another way, this Marvell is revealed even more profoundly that we have hitherto understood as our most important "son of Milton."

These two books, thus, evidence a broad range of criticism and critical approaches to the early modern period. While Ellrodt seeks to find the personal in the aesthetic, the contributors to Marvell and Liberty present art and political commitment as interrelated. Both books have much to offer and certainly will reward a close reading.